Guides ยท Updated 2026-09-28
How to read Search Console's generative AI report
Since 31 August 2026 every site in Google Search Console has a report for generative AI features. It is the first official number for how often Google's AI answers show your site. It is also easy to misread.
What it counts
- Impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode: a link to your site was shown to someone in one of those AI answers.
- Broken down by page, country, device and date.
What it does not count (yet)
- Clicks and click rate. You can see that the AI showed you, not whether anyone came.
- Queries. You do not see which searches triggered the AI answer.
- Other AI engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot are not in it. (Bing Webmaster Tools has its own Copilot citation report.)
How to make it useful
- Find your AI pages. Sort by impressions. These are the pages Google's AI already trusts. Keep them accurate and up to date; they are your strongest pages in the new search.
- Line it up with the normal report. For the same pages and dates, open Performance. If AI impressions rose while clicks fell, the AI is answering instead of sending people. Make the page worth the visit: prices, tools, examples, things a summary cannot give.
- Find the gaps. Pages with many normal impressions and no AI impressions are not being used as sources. Put a short, direct answer at the top of those.
- Check the rest of the AI world yourself. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini the searches that bring you Google traffic, a few times each, and note who they cite. Or let SearchLink do it for your real searches.
Check your own site in 30 seconds
Free, no sign-up. See which search and AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in, and the 3 things to fix first.
Source: Google Search Central Blog, "Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console" (June 2026); rollout to all sites 31 August 2026.